Erlotinib has been shown to have efficacy in pancreatic and biliary cancers, yet there was no published data on predictive value or prevalence of the abovementioned mutations in these tumor types, therefore this study was undertaken. The study failed to identify mutations in either PIK3CA or EGFR genes

for any of the thirty selleck products pancreaticobiliary tumor samples that were analyzed. It did identify one synonymous SNP (rs1050171) in the coding region of EGFR, and a previously unreported change, suspected to be a SNP, in intron 18 of EGFR (IVS18+15, C>T). The main limitation of our study is the small population size for pancreatic cancer and biliary tract cancer. Therefore, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical we conducted a review of the literature to explore the total selleck catalog number of patients

and mutation detection. The review showed an EGFR mutation rate of 2% and 10.5% in pancreatic and biliary tract carcinomas, respectively. PIK3CA mutations were demonstrated in 3.6% and 11.7% of pancreatic and biliary tract carcinomas, respectively. This pooled data from the literature Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical is in concordance with our study, showing similar rates in pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The prevalence of EGFR and PIK3CA mutations reported in the literature for pancreatic cancer was less than 5%. This finding may explain in part why erlotinib provides only a modest improvement in survival, as many other factors might play a role in the prognosis. Another limitation Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical results from the inclusion of a single patient who received neoadjuvant therapy, thus the desmoplastic component of the tumor might have interfered with sequencing. Genome-wide analysis is being utilized to identify mutations that might have an importance in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of pancreatic cancer. Harada et al. found frequent dysregulation of SKAP2/SCAP2 gene Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical (7p15.2) in pancreatic cancer (64). Vincent et al. found numerous target genes that were hypermethylated and silenced or hypomethylated and overexpressed (65), while Jones et al. reported that pancreatic cancers

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical have approximately 63 genetic alterations, mainly point mutations, which affect cellular signaling pathways (66). In contrast to pancreatic cancer, biliary tract cancer had a higher AV-951 prevalence of both EGFR and PIK3CA mutations, slightly over 10%, a value similar to that of EGFR mutation in NSCLC (4). Xu et al. reported that one third of Chinese patients with cholangiocarcinoma had PIK3CA mutations (42). This relatively high prevalence rate in Asian population might explain the varied response to treatment in different populations. Despite the fact that biliary tract cancer and pancreatic cancer share similar clinicopathological characteristics, the variation in EGFR and PIK3CA mutation rates might indicate that they have different pathophysiology. This research provides the background for designing future correlative prospective trials with EGFR inhibitors. It highlights the importance of studying the biology of each tumor due to their noted variability.